Quilting for Thomas Knauer

Thomas Knauer is a legend. Have you seen that has has published TWO books so far this year? One in January, one in February. Who does that? Thomas, that’s who. I was able to help out by quilting for him.

I first met Thomas back in June of 2018. (I wrote about it here.) Over the course of a weekend he helped me create a lovely mini quilt that was accepted for publication in Curated Quilts, and also hung at QuiltCon in 2019. Not bad for 2 days work, right? I enjoyed Thomas’ quilting, messaging, and teaching style very much.

When he reached out to me later to do some longarming for him I was shocked. I was doing professional longarming at that point, but for normal people. Not for people who had their stuff regularly acquired by museums. That first quilt almost killed me. Then there were a bunch more, and eventually I stopped being an annoying fangirl and settled down to being a friend.

As a side note. Most of our quilting idols are normal people like you and me. When we freak out upon meeting them, it makes them uncomfortable. Practice playing cool .

Quilt Out Loud is all about quilts that have something to say, which is Thomas’ specialty. It includes quilts with strong messages, and also information on making your own quilts with messages. One thing that sometimes makes working with Thomas hard is that so many of his messages are so strong. I try to be upbeat and happy most of the time. Then, along comes a quilt top from my friend, and it is the sentence for second degree rape. So, I have to process that someone decided that there are degrees of rape, and that sometimes the penalty is only 2-7 years. That takes a little of the fun out of the whole thing. Of course, that particular quilt was a special challenge. Thomas used a vintage floral sheet for the background, and wanted me to quilt around the flowers and make them look 3-d. He is the ONLY person who can get me to do that.

Look at the difference in texture in the quilted versus un-quilted part. I did this back in January of 2022, and I can’t believe I managed to keep it a secret.

The second book is Quilting Rhythm, which is totally different. It’s a library of all-over quilting designs. I tested several for Thomas, then quilted up a few samples that are used for photography in the book. I also tested a few designs on quilts that appear in Quilt Out Loud. This one was one of my favorites. (It’s Design #64.)

The concept of this book is so cool. If you are a free-motion quilter, it will give you guidance on how to form these shapes and use them to fill your quilt top. If you are a machine quilter, you can download them and use them for your personal quilts.

Thomas is one of my few remaining longarm clients. I’ve gotten too busy with other aspects of quilting, and no longer have time to quilt for others.

I hope you get to quilt something today!